[cam.pm] Backups + next pubmeet, Re: Hangover over?

[Matthew Astley]

On Sat, Apr 21, 2007 at 08:33:39AM +0100, Robbie Bow wrote:

> Hey, was good to see such a good turn out on Wednesday.  We ought to
> arrange another one for next month, but somewhere with a good garden
> this time.

The Blue?  I'm sure there are others.

I would prefer a non-Wednesday day.  No doubt everyone has different
days to avoid.  8-}


> A quick question apropos online backups: have been looking for an 
> alternative to XDrive for a Mac user friend.

I've just set Dad's Linux box up with dirvish.  It's Perl </obperl>
and rsync.  It keeps multiple copies of the source filesystems and
uses hardlinks to economise on unchanged files.

He's only dumping to another disk in the machine, but with the magic
of ssh authorisation key pairs you can send it...  somewhere else, if
there is anywhere.

But not if rsync can't cope with the UFS+ filesystem?
  http://www.dirvish.org/pipermail/dirvish/2006-October/001088.html


> Found lots of services for Windows (Mozy [...]

...so I picked on Mozy to see what's out there these days.

"448-bit Blowfish encryption" and "Public or private key encryption"
are phrases from their website that ring alarm bells for me.

Do people really want closed software copying their data back to some
random company?  It doesn't seem like the best idea.


Not that Dirvish looks particularly easy to fit with encrypted storage
that can't be peeked on the archiving side.  Sigh.

I have no Windows boxes at the moment so it's all rather academic for
me.  I use a mixture of Unison and (tar | bzip2 | gpg > DVD) for my
backups, but it's all rather slaphazard.


Matthew  #8-)